Saor have released The Awakening MMXXVI, the second song from Caledonia. It is a re-recording of a track that first appeared on Aura in 2014, and it follows Carved in Stone MMXXVI on an album of five revisited pieces, out on 6 November through Season of Mist.
The lyric is the plainest writing on the record. It opens as an instruction rather than an image: learn the lore of the land and become the atavist. From there it turns on the Gaelic word eirich, meaning rise, and ends on a vow to keep to the overgrown path the forefathers walked.
Andy Marshall, who is Saor on record, has said the point of the exercise is not nostalgia. These songs have been played live for a decade, and what the versions capture is the scale they acquired in that time rather than the scale they had in a bedroom in 2014.
Five tracks is all Caledonia holds, drawn from the project's first three albums. Taken together they close a circle between what Saor was at the start and what it has become, which is a tidier way of saying the recordings finally match the songs.